Black districts gutted as suburban flight reshapes congressional mapping

There are 22 majority-Black districts in the current Congress. Next year, there will be as few as nine.

The lost seats are a casualty of highly politicized redistricting wars, with state-by-state showdowns bringing dramatic change to electoral maps that were already being reshaped by demographic forces that include a Black migration to suburbs.

Even though majority-Black districts pack minority voters together in a way that has often diluted their power, they also routinely have sent high-profile lawmakers to Capitol Hill who answer to the needs of largely Black constituencies.

That has left some Black voters worried the new maps will marginalize their voices. The concern is especially apparent in Michigan: The state’s only two majority-Black districts have been dissolved, a move that could mean it fails to send a Black representative to Congress next year for the first time since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“This has been happening through gerrymandering and whatnot for 50 years,” said Oliver Cole, president of a neighborhood association in a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood in Detroit. “It’s not something that arbitrarily happened.”

The disappearance of these districts could erode Black representation in Washington at a moment when corporate America is responding to the Black Lives Matter movement by seeking to add more people of color to boardrooms and C-suites. And it is already shaping who joins the fray in Michigan politics and how candidates there are waging campaigns.

On Juneteenth, the Welcome Missionary Baptist Church in Pontiac, Mich., received visits from two white Michigan lawmakers: representatives Haley Stevens and Andy Levin, who — thanks to redistricting — are now competing for votes from the mostly Black congregants.

The Juneteenth campaigning highlighted Pontiac’s changing political influence. Before the redistricting cycle that followed the 2020 census, Pontiac was situated in a district that was 57 percent Black. Now, it’s in one that is only 14 percent Black.

Still, Black voters make up an outsize share of Democratic primary voters, and without a Black candidate on the ballot in a new 11th District, both Stevens and Levin are working hard to compete for those votes.

Nine states have lost at least one majority-Black district in the latest redistricting cycle, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Census Bureau and FiveThirtyEight. Four states — Florida, Georgia, Michigan and New York — will lose two such seats. Those losses aren’t being made up in states with growing Black populations.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Louisiana map that eliminated one of its two majority-Black districts. The court will take up the issue of minority representation this fall when it hears a challenge to an Alabama map that has just one Black congressional district out of seven despite a 27 percent Black population.